LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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TWO LECTURES ON THEISM 



PRINCETON LECTURES. 

A series of volumes containing the notable lectures de- 
livered on the occasion of the Sesquicentennial 
celebration of Princeton University. 

The French Revolution and English Literature. Six Lectures. 

By Prof Edward Dowden, Trinity College, Dublin. 
Theism. Two Lectures. By Prof. Andrew Seth, University of 
Edinburgh 

The Discharge of Electricity in Gases. Four Lectures. By Prof. 

J. J. Thomson, University of Cambridge. 
The Mathematical Theory of the Top. Four Lectures. By Prof 
Felix Klein, University of Gottingen. 

The Descent of the Primates. By Prof. A. A. W. Hubrecht, 

University of Utrecht. 

The Nature and Origin of the Noun Genders in the Indoger- 
manic Languages. By Prof. Karl Brugmann, University of 
Leipsic 

The Claims Of the Old Testament. Two Lectures By Prof. 
Staxley Leathes, D.D., King's College, London. 



TWO LECTURES ON 
THEISM 



DELIVERED ON THE OCCASION OF THE 

SESQUICENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF 

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY 



BY 



/ 



ANDREW SETH, M.A., LL.D. 
n 

Professor op Logic and Metaphysics in 
the University op Edinburgh 



*v 



v 



/ 



^ 



s 



NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRLBNER'S SONS 

1897 






T& 






Copyright, 1897, 
By Chakles Scribner's Sons 



SJnttoersitg ^ress: 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S. A, 



TWO LECTURES ON THEISM 
I 

Theee are three terms, not perhaps very clearly 
defined, — perhaps not employed by different 
writers with any strict uniformity of usage, — 
still, terms which may suffice to indicate at the 
outset the possible lines in which theories of the 
divine may move. The terms I mean are Pan- 
theism, Deism, and Theism. There is a certain 
differentiation between them, even in current 
usage. Pantheism either identifies God with the 
world of men and things, or, in the emphasis 
it lays upon the divine as the only reality, 
reduces the facts of finite existence to a mere 
show or appearance. Pantheism in its varied 
forms moves between these two extremes ; but 
the feature common to both is the denial of a 
distinction between God and the world. In the 
one case, God is explicitly equated with the 
world-process, so that there can be no talk of 
difference ; in the other case, we are taught that 
the difference is only a difference that seems. 
1 



2 THEISM 

Over against pantheism, in either of its phases, 
stands the view which I have called Deism. 
Deism lays so much stress on the difference, or, 
as it is here technically called, the transcendence, 
of the divine existence, that it removes God out 
of the world altogether, and sets him at a dis- 
tance alike from the play of nature's laws and 
the thoughts and actions of mankind, — a spirit 
beyond the stars, a being who created the world 
once upon a time, who may interfere at times 
with the machinery, but who contents himself 
on the whole with " seeing it go." This view, 
though repudiated by religious feeling and by 
the more profound theological thinkers, is em- 
bedded in a great deal of popular theology and 
popular religion. And in more prosaic ages of 
thought it is sure to predominate, to the exclu- 
sion or neglect of the truth for which pantheism 
contends. The deistic God, an Eire supreme or 
Great First Cause, is the kind of God whose exist- 
ence the so-called "proofs of the existence of 
God" are intended to establish. People even 
speak in this connection of proving the existence 
of a God, — a phrase which obviously implies 
that they think of God as an individual among 
other individuals, and therefore as a finite being 
within the universe in the widest sense of that 



THEISM 3 

term. This is of course seen to be impossible, as 
soon as speculation rouses itself. Monotheism, 
conceived in this deistic fashion, is a survival of 
polytheistic belief, — a higher development, no 
doubt, but not different in kind. 

There is a certain amount of authority for the 
use of the term Theism to indicate a view which 
endeavors — whether it succeeds or not is another 
question, but which at least endeavors — to recog- 
nize both immanence and transcendence, and so to 
do justice to the truths which underlie the one- 
sided extremes of pantheism and deism. The 
elements which must be combined in a theistic 
doctrine which shall satisfy both the head and 
the heart — both the speculative and the practi- 
cal reason — can only be appreciated after some 
consideration of the contrasted extremes which 
it endeavors to mediate between, or, as the 
phrase runs, to combine in a higher unity. 

The contrasts exhibit themselves to some 
extent on the stage of history, when we look at 
the course of modern philosophy. All historical 
generalizations of this kind require modification, 
when we look into the detailed history of the 
time ; they are in the main simply suggestive 
points of view, and I am far from desiring to 
press unduly the view of the course of modern 



4 THEISM 

speculation which I am about to propound, in 
face of the exceptions which any one so inclined 
might produce against it. Still, it is not uncom- 
mon in the best histories of philosophy to regard 
the seventeenth century as an age of universal- 
ism, followed in the eighteenth century by a 
swing of the pendulum to the opposite extreme 
of individualism. Universalism, in this philo- 
sophic use of the term, implies a tendency to 
pantheism. Individualism means, in its first 
stage, deism, — an individually separate first 
cause, as the originator of the finite individu- 
alities whose reality demands explanation. The 
difficulties which deism encounters in its search 
for such a God lead on this line of thought 
towards an atheistic culmination. The astron- 
omer sweeps the heavens with his telescope and 
finds no God ; reason finds it impossible to stop 
anywhere in the infinite regress of finite or phe- 
nomenal causes. The proposal to prove by the 
scientific law of causality the existence of an 
uncaused being seems, indeed, little better than 
a contradiction in terms. Hence the deistic God 
is at last discarded as a hypothesis which is not 
required. 

Something like this development reaHy took 
place in modern thought, if we look only at 



THEISM 5 

its main currents. Seventeenth-century thought 
may be said, without injustice, to culminate in 
the great pantheistic system of Spinoza. This 
was what the Cartesian era issued in. And that 
this speculative strain is by no means to be 
attributed solely to the exceptional individuality 
of Spinoza, as a man and a thinker, is conclu- 
sively shown by the development of the same 
tendency independently by Malebranche, a Chris- 
tian priest. Malebranche refers to Spinoza with 
virtuous indignation as a miserable, just as Locke, 
the individualist and deist, disclaims all kindred 
with his "justly decried" name, or as Hume, 
the individualistic sceptic, refers, with less excuse, 
to " that famous atheist " and his " hideous 
hypothesis" (Treatise, Bk. I. Part 4). Male- 
branche's system differs from Spinoza's, no 
doubt, in some not unessential points, where his 
Christian consciousness makes itself felt ; and his 
intention is unquestionably theistic. But, in the 
main determinations of their systems, the Father 
of the Oratory and the excommunicated Jew 
coincide so closely that it is plain both are 
upborne by a common stream of tendency in the 
thought of the time. 

Locke and Leibnitz were the minds who chiefly 
shaped the thought of the eighteenth century. 



6 THEISM 

The activity of both carries us back some dis- 
tance into the seventeenth, just as the shaping 
forces of the nineteenth begin to show them- 
selves a good many years before 1800. Leib- 
nitz's system is a rehabilitation of the rights of 
the individual life against the all-devouring 
pantheism of Spinoza. Leibnitz himself was 
too profoundly speculative a mind to find the 
last word of philosophy in a doctrine of bare 
Pluralism, that is, to accept a number of indi- 
vidual reals as absolutely self-subsistent and 
mutually independent. He endeavored to em- 
brace them within the unity and harmony of 
a single system ; and, in thus rendering justice 
to the truth which the universalistic systems 
emphasize, went so far sometimes in his expres- 
sions as to lay himself open to the imputation 
of Spinozism at the hands of his own degenerate 
successors, the prosaic and shallow philosophers 
of the Auf klarung, or Enlightenment. For it 
was the fate of the Leibnitzian philosophy, as 
it was developed in Germany, to be gradually 
stripped of its profounder elements. In being 
adapted for popular consumption, it was reduced 
to a cold and formal rationalism, in which the 
relation of God to the world became more and 
more external. 



THEISM 7 

On the other hand, in England and in France, 
Locke's "Essay," with its somewhat prosaic com- 
mon-sense and narrow horizons, was the philo- 
sophical Bible of the century. To Locke himself 
an extra-mundane deity was a matter of demon- 
strative certainty, on the strength ot the law of 
causation. Such demonstrations were frequent 
during the century ; but Coleridge complains, not 
without reason, that men had come to regard G-od's 
relation to the world in much the same light as 
that of a mason to his work. A Demiurge or 
world-builder was, in fact, a]l that such an argu- 
ment could at best succeed m proving ; and as 
the stable mechanical conditions of the universe 
were more clearly realized, and also the incon- 
gruity became more apparent of passing along 
the line of phenomenal causation to a non-phe- 
nomenal first cause, this mechanical deism 
easily gave place to atheism. But deism was 
the first development. The first fruit of Locke's 
"Essay" in England was the historically impor- 
tant movement known as English deism, with 
its so-called "religion of nature." It was against 
this form of thought that Butler directed his 
"Analogy of Natural and Eevealed Eeligion." 
But, as was seen in the well-known case of 
James Mill, this argumentum ad hominem, in- 



» THEISM 

tended to drive a deist back upon Christianity, 
was a double-edged weapon, and might just as 
logically lead a less convinced deist to abandon 
his deism for an atheistic or completely scep- 
tical position. This free-thinking English deism 
was transplanted to France by Voltaire, whose 
religion, if any man's, was based upon the pure 
understanding. Voltaire was as strenuous an 
opponent of atheism as he was of Christianity. 
But the drift of empirical philosophy towards 
a materialistic atheism went on apace during 
his lifetime among the circle of the encyclo- 
paedists, of whom Diderot is the greatest name. 
The views of this circle were given to the world 
in 1770 in the Baron d'Holbach's once famous 
"Systeme de la Nature." 

This book in the first flush of its reputation, 
and with all the adventitious charms of a sup- 
pressed work, fell into the hands of the youth- 
ful ■ Goethe at Strassburg. He tells us in his 
autobiography the impression which it made 
upon him and his friends. "We did not un- 
derstand how such a book could be dangerous. 
It seemed to us so gray, so Cimmerian, so death- 
like, that we had difficulty in enduring its pres- 
ence; we shuddered at it as at a spectre. Not 
one of us had read the book through, for we 



THEISM 9 

found the expectations disappointed with which 
we had opened it. 'System of Nature' was the 
announcement, and we hoped in consequence 
really to learn something of nature, our idol. 
But how hollow and empty we felt in this 
melancholy atheistic half-darkness (Halbnacht), 
in which the earth with all her forms, the 
heaven with all its constellations, vanished. 
Matter was said to exist from eternity, and to 
be in motion from eternity; and through this 
motion — to right and to left and in all direc- 
tions — it was said to produce, without more 
ado, the infinite phenomena of existence. We 
might even have put up with this, if the author 
had really built up the world before our eyes 
out of his matter in motion. But apparently 
he knew as little about nature ^as we did ; for 
after laying down some general notions, he 
leaves them at once, in order to transform all 
that appears higher than nature, or as a higher 
nature in nature, into a nature that is material, 
ponderable, in motion, it is true, but without 
direction or form. And he believes that he 
has thereby gained a wonderful deal." This 
was the meeting of the old and the new. The 
highest wisdom of the declining century — or 
what gave itself out as such — appeared as 



10 THEISM 

foolishness — " the quintessence of senility " are 
Goethe's own words — to the pulsing life of 
the youth who was so largely to shape the 
thoughts of the corning time. 

In England empiricism developed into scep- 
ticism in Hume, while the orthodox theology, 
which had at first looked askance at Locke, be- 
came more and more impregnated with the prin- 
ciples of the deism it had officially to combat. 
And the century eventually finds its typical theo- 
logical representative in Paley, whose almighty 
watchmaker is as true to Locke's conception of 
deity as his definition of virtue, as " the doing 
good to mankind in obedience to the will of God 
and for the sake of everlasting happiness," repro- 
duces Locke's account of "the true ground of 
morality, which can only be the will and law 
of a God who sees men in the dark, has in his 
hands rewards and punishments, and power 
enough to call to account the proudest offender." 
Thus an interested or purely selfish morality — 
a heteronomous morality, in the Kantian phrase, 
— is the natural outcome of a theory which 
makes God a merely external creator and law- 
giver. And it is significant that when Goethe 
sought refuge with Spinoza from the godless mech- 
anism of eighteenth-century materialism, what 



THEISM 11 

especially attracted him was the disinterested- 
ness which breathes in every line of the " Ethics," 
even to the culminating sentence which Goethe 
quotes, " He that truly loves God must not de- 
sire that God should love him in return." That 
is almost certainly not the whole truth either, 
but at least it throws into glaring relief the mean- 
ness of Paley's view, and the insufficiency of the 
theory of which it forms an integral part. 

It was by a natural instinct that men turned 
in revulsion from the cramping influences of the 
current theology, whether orthodox or free-think- 
ing, to the great misapprehended Jewish thinker. 
For nigh upon a hundred years people had talked 
about Spinoza, says Lessing, as if he were a dead 
dog. A rationalistic opponent, not content with 
the ordinary weapons of controversy, prefixed to 
his efforts a portrait of Spinoza with the inscrip- 
tion, "Signum reprobationis in vultu gerens." 
And, as Goethe humorously adds, the engraving 
was so shockingly bad that there was no denying 
the allegation. The casual allusions of Locke and 
Hume, already quoted, are fair specimens of the 
way in which Spinoza is usually referred to all 
through the age of individualism. Lessing, that 
great and intrepid pioneer of nineteenth-century 
thought and literature, was among the first to 



12 THEISM 

break the spell. Jacobi, though diametrically 
opposed to Spinoza's method and result, con- 
tributed by his publications to enhance his philo- 
sophical importance in the eyes of the rising 
generation. Goethe has put on record, in more 
than one place, the deep impression which the 
"Ethics" made upon him. The influence of Spi- 
noza was decisive upon the great German ideal- 
ists who developed the philosophy of Kant, more 
especially upon Schelling and Hegel. Empha- 
size their minor differences from him as they 
may, he is yet to them the greatest figure in 
modern philosophy. Instead of his atheism 
Hegel talks of his Akosmism, just as Novalis 
speaks of him as a God-intoxicated man. Through 
these and other post-Kantian systems, the univer- 
salistic strain became once more dominant in 
modern philosophy, while through Schleierma- 
cher the same influence made itself powerfully 
felt in theology. Schleiermacher's eloquent apos- 
trophe is well known, in which he calls upon all 
true men to " offer, as in the ancient fashion, a 
lock of hair to the manes of the holy and excom- 
municated Spinoza. The sublime spirit of the 
universe penetrated him ; the infinite was his 
beginning and his end, the universal his only and 
eternal love." 



THEISM 13 

And far beyond the limits of the schools, 
whether philosophical or theological, the same 
movement of man's mind is observable at the 
turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 
In England it was the expansive power of the 
poetic imagination that shattered the world of 
the prosaic understanding, and communicated to 
literature that sense " of something far more 
deeply interfused," which Wordsworth, its noblest 
exponent, celebrates in his famous " Lines com- 
posed above Tintern Abbey," — 

" a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ; 
A motion and a spirit that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things." 

Wordsworth and Coleridge had had their con- 
versations about Spinoza aod the new German 
philosophy on the ferny slopes of the Quantocks 
and by the shores of the Severn-sea ; but to 
Wordsworth this insight into the unity and 
kinship of all that is, flowed directly, without 
the need of such intermediary, from " the spirit 
of religious love in which he walked with Nature." 
Coleridge, we know, claimed to have reached in- 



14 THEISM 

dependently at an earlier date the same results 
as Schelling ; and all his life long he contemplated 
a book on the Logos, which was, in his own words, 
to unite Spinozism and the mechanical deism in 
" the theism of Saint Paul and Christianity." 1 
Shelley's aerial flight carries him towards panthe- 
ism pure and simple, rising at times to an enthu- 
siastic worship of the Spirit of Beauty in all that 
lives, and again passing into that pantheism of illu- 
sion which may verge closely upon pessimism. 

" The one remains, the many change and pass ; 
Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly ; 
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, 
Stains the white radiance of eternity, 
Until death tramples it to fragments. — Die, 
If thou would'st be with that which thou dost seek." 

But, with whatever varieties in accent, all these 
poetic voices give utterance to the essential truth 
that the divine is not to be sought as a problem- 
atical Spirit beyond the stars. God is revealed to 
us alike in the face of nature and in our own 
self-conscious life, — in the common reason which 
binds mankind together and in the ideals which 
light us on our upward path. God is not far 
from any one of us. Within us and around us, 
here or nowhere, God is to be found. This truth 

1 Biographia Literaria, chapter 12. 



THEISM 15 

may be said to have remained a permanent pos- 
session of the present century. Jobly empha- 
sized by Carlyle and Emerson, it has gradually 
leavened that slow-moving mass of popular think- 
ing which generally lags so painfully behind the 
best insight of its own time. For the enlight- 
enment of one century lives on, as dogma and 
prejudice, to impede the higher thought of the 
next. Carlyle's running polemic against what 
he calls "the mechanical system of thought," 
and the grim irony with which he assails the 
notion of "proof of a God," — "a probable God," 
— furnish some of his strongest passages, while 
the chapter of " Sartor " in which he outlines 
the counter-doctrine of "Natural Supernatural- 
ism " is one of the most moving pieces of English 
prose. 

But it is time to return from this general sur- 
vey of modern thought to the more strictly philo- 
sophical discussion of the subject. And in doing 
so, we shall find our natural starting-point in the 
philosophy of Kant, from which all the lines of 
modern speculation may be said to radiate. The 
great German idealists, I said, were under the 
decisive influence of Spinoza ; and they are some- 
times treated as if they had simply revived his 
pantheism, and grafted it upon the Critical phi- 



16 THEISM 

losophy of Kant. That, however, would be a 
superficial view. The history of philosophy 
shows no such resurrection of the body of a 
philosophical system, though the spirit of it may 
live again in another age. So the dominant uni- 
versalism of Spinoza's thought lived again in 
Schelling and Hegel; but the body it took to 
itself was developed under other auspices and in 
another intellectual atmosphere. It was as much 
the natural outgrowth of Kantianism, as Spinozism 
was the natural outgrowth of Cartesianism. And 
in Hegel's philosophy, at all events, the new uni- 
versalism certainly aims at correcting the defects 
of the old, — and not only aims at doing so, but 
in important points succeeds. While subscribing 
unreservedly, as every speculative mind must, to 
Spinoza's fundamental proposition, " Quicquid est 
in Deo est," and accepting therefore his doctrine 
of immanent causality, Hegel differentiates his 
own system from Spinoza's, in that he defines the 
Absolute not as Substance, but as Subject. He 
endeavors, that is, to conceive the universe as 
the process of a self-conscious life, and not as 
the determination of a substance that in itself is 
bare of all determinations, and possesses, there- 
fore, no creative nisus (so to speak), which might 
explain its self-determination into the manifold 



THEISM 17 

forms of the finite world. Hegel escapes in this 
way, too, the negative logic of Spinoza, which, by 
finding true reality in the perfectly undetermined, 
reduces all the distinctions of finite existence to 
a species of illusion. The process of history and 
of human life is to Hegel eminently real. That 
at least is his prevailing attitude of mind. 

How, then, did this new universalism spring 
from the philosophy of Kant? Kant's philos- 
ophy has many sides, and one strain of Kantian 
thought has contributed much to the strength 
of agnosticism in the present century. The sub- 
jectivity and agnosticism which cling to Kant's 
doctrine of knowledge must, however, in fairness 
be regarded as incidental to the way in which he 
reached his main results, not as themselves con- 
stituting his permanently valuable contribution 
to modern thinking. On the intellectual side, 
that contribution undoubtedly consists in his 
doctrine of the categories, — in the demonstra- 
tion, to put it generally, of a system of rational 
conceptions which are involved in every self- 
conscious act of mind, which enter, therefore, 
into the construction of every object we know. 
They are the conditions of the very possibility of 
experience as such, and may be regarded, there- 
fore, as the irreducible essence of the rational 
2 



18 THEISM 

world. Kant himself did not give a complete 
list or an exhaustive account of these concep- 
tions, nor can he be said to have, in all cases, 
treated satisfactorily their relation to one another 
and to the supreme unity of self-consciousness 
whose forms they are. But he named the most 
important, and bequeathed to his successors the 
fruitful idea of an organized system — an organ- 
ism — of reason. 

Kant himself regarded the categories as merely 
subjective, as a necessary equipment of human 
understanding if we are to have experience at 
all, bat still merely a subjective mould, as it 
were, into which we run the fluid and form- 
less material of sensation, — something, in short, 
contributed by the subject in the act of knowl- 
edge, and therefore of essentially limited validity, 
not predicable of reality as such. But such 
mere subjectivity is, in the very nature of the 
case, impossible to prove. Even if our cate- 
gories were purely subjective, it is impossible 
we should ever come to know it; and the idea of 
a world of things in themselves, apart from the 
world we know, may easily be shown to dissolve 
in contradictions. A world, real and independent 
of the individual's transient acts of knowledge, is 
not a world divorced from intelligence altogether. 



THEISM 19 

The fact, therefore, that a category lives subjec- 
tively in the act of the knowing mind is no proof 
that the category does not at the same time truly 
express the nature of the reality known. It 
would be so only if we suppose the knowing sub- 
ject to stand outside of the real universe alto- 
gether, and to come to inspect it from afar with 
mental spectacles of a foreign make. In that 
case, no doubt, the forms of his thought might 
be a distorting medium. But the case only re- 
quires to be stated plainly for its inherent ab- 
surdity to be seen. The knower is in the world 
which he comes to know, and the forms of his 
thought, so far from being an alien growth or an 
imported product, are themselves a function of 
the whole. As a French writer 1 puts it, " con- 
sciousness, so far from being outside reality, is 
the immediate presence of reality to itself and 
the inward unrolling of its riches." When this 
is once grasped, the idea of thought as a kind of 
necessary evil — Kant really treats it as such — 
ceases to have even a superficial plausibility. 
Unless we consider existence a bad joke, we have 
no option save tacitly to presuppose the harmony 
of the subjective function with the nature of the 
universe from which it springs. 

1 M. Fouillee, in his " L'Evolutionnisme cles Idees-forces." 



20 THEISM 

The subjectivity of Kant's treatment of the 
categories was, however, incidental to the scheme, 
and was immediately abandoned by his idealistic 
successors. It is the point against which Hegel 
brings some of his heaviest artillery to bear. His 
criticism of Kant in this respect is absolutely 
conclusive. "Thoughts," as he says, "do not 
stand between us and things, shutting us off 
from the things ; they rather shut us together 
with them." In Hegel's hands, therefore, the 
analysis of the structure of thought is, in his 
own daring phrase, "the exposition of God as 
he is in his eternal essence, before the creation 
of nature or a single human spirit." Or, to put 
it perhaps less alarmingly, nature maybe viewed, 
in its formal essence, as a system of objective 
thought, — a fossilized intelligence, according to 
the phrase which Hegel repeats from Schelling. 
The finite mind elicits these thoughts in the 
process of experience, and in doing so may fitly 
be said to rethink the thoughts of the creative 
reason. But the finite mind is itself an effluence 
or reproduction of that reason. Thought there- 
fore shuts us together with things because it is 
the common essence both of the subject and the 
object ; and it is their common essence only be- 
cause it expresses, on the intellectual side, the 



THEISM 21 

nature of God himself, the ultimate fact within 
which nature and man are both somehow con- 
tained. Hence the central position assigned to 
logic in the Hegelian scheme; for logic inves- 
tigates the abstract types, the conceptions, of 
which we find the real exemplifications in nature 
and history. So that Hegel says sometimes that 
the other philosophic sciences, the Philosophy of 
Nature and the Philosophy of Mind, may be re- 
garded as, so to speak, an applied logic. Eeason, 
or thought, is not an accident of man ; it is the 
presence in him of the universal world-reason, 
the light that lighteth every man that cometh 
into the world. In virtue of its presence in all 
men, interchange of thought becomes possible, 
and, with that, the growth of society and all the 
history of civilization, all these things being 
based upon a common system or organism of 
reason. And, in like manner, the fabric of ex- 
ternal nature becomes transparent and intelli- 
gible to the mind, seeing that it reveals itself 
as the embodiment of the same conceptions. 
" We recognize in nature's inner heart only our 
own reason and feel ourselves at home there. 
Spirit has the certainty which Adam had when 
he saw Eve. ' This is flesh of my flesh and bone 
of my bone.' " Thought is thus the great unifier ; 



22 THEISM 

it is that which welds God and Nature and Man 
together as members of one whole. To know 
reason, therefore, is to know God ; the presence 
of reason within us is the presence of God ; the 
progressive rationalization of the world by sci- 
ence is a continuous extension of our knowledge 
of God, — a cumulative theistic proof, if it is 
right to talk of proof in a case where necessary 
assumption might better express the real state of 
affairs. 

But this purely intellectual account of the 
divine, as a system of thoughts or conceptions, is 
obviously not in itself a sufficient doctrine of 
God. It requires to be supplemented from the 
ethical side. And here again we must take our 
start from Kant, who is the modern ethicist par 
excellence, who has in fact founded upon ethics 
his whole positive teaching. The ethical the- 
ology in which Kant's system culminates is, to 
my mind, by far the most important contribution 
of modern philosophy towards a vital theism. 
And this remains true, although we may be just 
as little able to accept Kant's doctrine here in 
the precise form in which he clothed it, as we 
were able to accept his theory of the categories 
as subjective forms of the human mind. Al- 
though he opened the way for the whole course 



THEISM 23 

of nineteenth-century thought, Kant remained 
himself in many particulars a man of the eigh- 
teenth, and in his ethics we have to disengage the 
theory from its eighteenth-century vestments. 

Kant goes to work in the ethical sphere in 
much the same way as in the intellectual ; he 
sets out by asking what is the condition, or what 
are the conditions, of the possibility of ethical 
experience at all. The fundamental condition, 
he discovers, is the unconditional " thou shalt " 
of Duty, — what he calls the categorical impera- 
tive. Here his position is impregnable ; there 
is no passage from " is " to " ought." Whatever 
scheme of ethics we follow, whatever standard 
we adopt as the touchstone of the lightness of 
an action, — say we are utilitarians, for example, 
or even enlightened hedonists, — the ultimate 
judgment which enjoins the realization of that 
standard must contain an unconditional and irre- 
ducible " ought." If we are to have ethics at all, 
then, as a system of precepts, we must rest some- 
where upon a categorical imperative. Having 
established this point, Kant proceeds to ask 
what more this " ought " involves. First of all, 
" ought " involves " can." It is essentially absurd 
to address a command to a being who has no 
power to conform to it. The ethical " ought " 



24 THEISM 

applies not to the inanimate things of nature, 
which act according to laws of which they them- 
selves know nothing ; it applies only to beings 
who have the capacity of acting according to 
the idea of a law, that is, who have the power of 
determining themselves according to the idea of 
an end, — beings who have a will, who are free. 
Moral freedom is therefore the first implication 
or postulate of the ethical life. And to it Kant 
adds, in a somewhat forced and artificial fashion, 
the two other postulates of God and immortality. 
Immortality is postulated because the conflict 
between the law of duty and the lower self of 
inclination cannot be brought to a victorious 
conclusion within the present life, or indeed 
within any finite period of time. The perfect 
will which morality demands is a flying goal, 
" which fades for ever and for ever as we move." 
An infinite progress of approximation is all that 
the finite being can realize, and for that infinite 
progress an infinite time is demanded. In other 
words, the ethical being is necessarily immortal. 
The postulate of the divine existence suffers 
most from the way in which it is introduced. 
Kant had resolutely discarded all considerations 
of happiness from his ethical imperative and his 
idea of the virtuous man. Duty is to be done 



THEISM 25 

for duty's sake alone ; otherwise the act has no 
ethical value whatever. But though the moral 
man must take no account of happiness in his 
actions, it would still contradict our sense of 
righteousness and justice if there were to be a 
fundamental divorce between virtue and hap- 
piness, or even a total want of any correlation 
between them. Correlation of some sort is a de- 
mand which the ethical consciousness makes of 
the universal scheme of things. This is a postu- 
late of morality, in the sense that without it mo- 
rality would not be fully intelligible ; without it 
morality would have no root in the nature of 
things. The appearance of morality would be 
an unexplained intrusion in a cosmos which took 
no account of it one way or another. The man 
who was moral in such circumstances could be so 
only in a spirit of stoical despair or defiant re- 
volt. If morality is to be fully justified, we 
must believe that in morality we have the uni- 
verse somehow behind us. But the system of 
natural causes in the midst of which our present 
life is lived, shows no inevitable adjustment of 
happiness to virtue. The wicked flourish like a 
green bay-tree. " All things come alike to all : 
there is one event to the righteous and to the 
wicked ; to the good, and to the clean, and to the 



26 THEISM 

unclean ; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that 
sacrificeth not." 

" Streams will not curb their pride 
The just man not to entomb, 
Nor lightnings go aside 
To give his virtues room ; 
Nor is that wind less rough that blows a good man's 
barge." 

But there is no need to enlarge upon a discre- 
pancy which has furnished moralists with a theme 
since history's dawn. Kant's argument based 
upon it is that if the present sensible world 
offers no guarantee of such adjustment, the 
adjustment must be made in the interests of 
morality hereafter by a moral governor of the 
universe, to whom the sensible world is only 
part of a wider scheme of things. 

However important the truth it embodies, 
it is obvious that Kant's statement here is pain- 
fully bald and mechanical. He first separates 
what he has no right to separate, and then 
brings what he has separated externally to- 
gether again. God is not here directly con- 
nected with the substance of the moral law ; 
he is not represented as the source of the ideal 
which it sets up within us. He is simply, as it 
were, the official of the law, the instrument for 



THEISM 27 

carrying out the demands which the ethical 
consciousness makes. The law of duty is self- 
imposed, according to the fundamental tenet of 
the Kantian ethics. It is true, Kant afterwards 
enjoins us, in his philosophy of religion, to obey 
the law as the law of God. But there is no direct 
and inevitable connection between the two posi- 
tions ; for God, as we see here, is treated by Kant 
in the most extreme deistic fashion, as a being 
entirely apart from the self of the individual. 
It is not, however, as an external lawgiver that 
God is the source of the ethical law or ideal. 
Against that view, Kant rightly insists on the 
necessity that the law shall be self-imposed, if it 
is to carry with it an authority against which 
there is no appeal. He does not fully see, how- 
ever, that if its imposition is referred to the self 
of the isolated individual, we are thrown back 
into subjectivity, and are quite as much at a loss 
as before to account for the authority of the law, 
the consciousness of absolute obligation which 
accompanies it, — an obligation not only for me, 
but for all rational beings. This authority, 
claimed and exercised by the higher self, is 
only intelligible if the ideals of that self are 
recognized as the immediate presence within us 
of a spirit leading us into all truth and goodness. 



28 THEISM 

The moral law is not first imposed by the indi- 
vidual self (in the theory of ethics), and then 
ratified or re-imposed by an external lawgiver 
(in the theory of religion). Bather the two are 
one from the beginning. God is the source and 
author of the law, but only in the sense that he 
is the higher self within the self which inwardly 
illuminates all our lives. 

Instead of connecting God in this direct way 
with the substance of morality, Kant gives him 
an external and instrumental relation to it. But, 
if it is not right to treat a human being merely 
as a means, it must surely be a false way of 
putting things to present God in this merely 
instrumental light. The undignified nature of 
the position is enhanced, when it is seen that he 
is treated simply as a means to the happiness of 
the individual, — a deus ex machina, introduced 
to effect the equation of virtue and happiness. 
This is, even from the point of view of morality 
itself, an unfortunate way of stating the postu- 
late in question. The puritanic preacher of duty 
for duty's sake lapses curiously, we might al- 
most say, into the hedonistic morality of the 
eighteenth century, which he elsewhere so 
strenuously condemns. For, after all, it is not 
happiness in any banal sense that the ethical 



THEISM 29 

consciousness claims as the wages of well-doing. 
It sets up no demand that all its acts of self- 
restraint or self-sacrifice shall be recompensed by 
doles of happiness, — as if, says Spinoza, men 
expected to be decorated by God with high 
rewards for their virtue and their best actions, 
as for having endured the direst slavery. What 
the ethical consciousness does demand is rather, 
as I have put it, to feel the universe behind it, to 
know that we are living in a moral cosmos, where 
our efforts avail somewhat, and where virtue may 
have the wages of going on and not to die. 

It will be observed also in how baldly indi- 
vidualistic a spirit the moral order is here con- 
ceived by Kant. I am far from being satisfied 
with a universalism which sacrifices the indi- 
vidual to the progress of the race. As I have 
ventured to put it on another occasion, " even if 
the enormous spiral of human history is destined 
to wind itself to a point which may be called 
achievement, what of the generations that per- 
ished by the way ? ' These all died, not having 
received the promises.' What if there are no 
promises to them ? " If there are not, this opti- 
mism of progress seems to me as tragic at heart 
as any pessimism. I agree with Kant that the 
immortality of the individual is necessary, if we 



30 THEISM 

are to have a solution that can really call itself 
optimistic, a solution that we can really embrace 
as satisfying in the largest sense. But there is no 
reason why the recognition of this should make 
us ignore the solidarity of the race, and treat the 
individuals in sheer isolation, as Kant seems here 
to do. If we can recognize a moral purpose in 
history, as the education of mankind as a whole, 
that gives our entire ethical conception a greater 
grandeur of outline without impairing our convic- 
tions as to the destiny of the individual. 

But the severance of the individual from the 
life of the race is due to Kant's initial separation 
between the individual self and the inspiring 
presence of the divine life. And it is finally to 
be noted that, just because Kant makes an abso- 
lute separation of this kind, the imperative of 
duty becomes for him an empty form without any 
ethical content. It is an unconditional command, 
but it commands nothing in particular, because 
it has no organic connection with the material of 
moral duty, as that has been evolved in the course 
of history by the moral experiences of mankind. 
The applicability of the imperative to any par- 
ticular course of action becomes a matter of ab- 
stract and somewhat round-about demonstration. 
This is the formalism of Kant's ethical theory 



THEISM 31 

which almost all his critics have condemned, and 
which is, in many ways, the counterpart of the 
subjectivity of his doctrine of reason. 

The advance of Kant's successors, particularly 
of Hegel, was to connect the ethical as well as 
the intellectual experience of man directly with 
the divine life, and by so doing to root Kant's 
abstract individual in the historic life of human- 
ity. In other words, they universalized the ethi- 
cal as they had done the intellectual theory. The 
progress of man upwards from ' the ape and tiger ' 
to the civilization of the present day, with its 
altruistic and humanitarian ideals, — this whole 
ethical process, with the customs and institutions 
in which it embodies itself, its laws, its public 
opinion, its shifting but ever deepening and 
widening ideals of honor and chivalry, of hero- 
ism or saintly life, of justice and self-control, — 
all this development can be rightly understood 
only when regarded as the progressive unfolding 
from within of an ideal of goodness, which in 
itself is the most real of realities. The ideal is 
not communicated to all men in the same form, 
or to the earlier ages with the same fulness as to 
the later ; for it is the nature of morality to be 
a progress, — a progress won by effort. Character 
is not born, but made ; it takes shape under the 



32 THEISM 

pressure of temptation and difficulty. The ad- 
vance of historical study has long lifted us above 
the notion of an abstract conscience promulgat- 
ing to all men the same perfect moral law. The 
content of the moral law grows in every way from 
age to age. An age is not furnished with more 
light than it needs to solve its own problems ; 
revelations are not made till the fulness of time 
has come, that is, till the hearts and minds of men 
are prepared by their previous training to under- 
stand and appreciate the new truth. If it were 
otherwise, the revelation would pass uncompre- 
hended over the heads of the generation to which 
it was addressed. It would be as unprofitable as 
the gift of prophesying in an unknown tongue. 
So natural is this process of divine education that 
it seems as if the new insight were wrested by 
man himself from the void and formless infinite, 
— as if the new truth, the new ideal, were the 
creation of his own spirit. And he then bows 
down and worships himself as a god in a godless 
world. These, however, are but the two sides of 
the shield which may be opposed to one another 
to all eternity. All moral and religious truth is 
won by the race for itself, in the sweat of its own 
moral experience, but not without the indwelling 
spirit of God. 



THEISM 33 



II 



We considered in the preceding lecture the 
contributions of Kant and Hegel toward a the- 
istic position, and we found that these contribu- 
tions were of the most fundamental importance. 
The idea of the world as a system of reason, and 
the idea of it as a moral order, are surely the most 
essential constituents of an adequate conception 
of God. But we have still to ask whether this 
contribution constitutes in itself an adequate 
account of the Divine Being. Does this phi- 
losophy — does Hegel in particular — carry us 
beyond this conception (so far abstract and im- 
personal) of a system of reason and a moral 
order ? Beyond doubt, many who have called 
themselves Hegelians have believed that their 
master's system was not only consistent with 
theism, but was neither more nor less than the 
philosophical expression of the deepest Christian 
doctrine of God. It is certainly possible, there- 
fore, to interpret the system in this sense ; but it 
may be that this interpretation relies to a consid- 
erable extent on the beliefs which the interpreters 
bring with them to the study of their author. 
The Hegelian system itself, if interpreted with 



34 THEISM 

logical consistency, and according to its dominant 
spirit, scarcely seems to carry us to such conclu- 
sions ; and by the most brilliant followers of the 
master they have been explicitly denied. 

The strength of Hegel's philosophy lies, as we 
have seen, in his insistence on the doctrine of im- 
manence, — the immanence of divine reason in 
the world. The polemical emphasis of the system 
is directed against the agnostic relativism of the 
Kantian Critique with its doctrine of the thing- 
in-itself, and against the easy mysticism of Schel- 
ling's Philosophy of Identity. Our knowledge 
does not banter us with shows and phantasms ; 
it is a knowledge of reality, its result is truth. In 
ultimate terms, it is describable as a revelation of 
the nature of God. God, therefore, is not an Un- 
knowable, nor is he, as Schelling said, a Neutrum, 
— a pure identity in which there are no distinc- 
tions, and of which, therefore, we can make no 
predications. But, in reaction against this error, 
Hegel's gift of forcible statement led him into ex- 
pressions which seem to imply a no less question- 
able extreme. In preaching the truth that the 
Absolute is revealed in the world of its appear- 
ances, not craftily concealed behind them, Hegel 
seems to pass to a sheer identification of the two. 
But while it is true that the two aspects must be 



THEISM 35 

everywhere combined, — an absolute which does 
not appear or reveal itself, and an appearance 
without something which appears being correla- 
tive abstractions, — that is not tantamount to say- 
ing that the appearance of the absolute to itself, 
— the divine life as lived by God himself, — is 
identical with the appearance which the world 
presents to the Hegelian philosopher. 

Hegel does tend, however, in many of his state- 
ments, to put the philosopher in the place of deity, 
and literally to identify the history of humanity 
with the development of the Absolute. But, 
surely, although we may reasonably hold that the 
evolution of mankind, and the fashioning, by the 
manifold experiences of time, of spirits fitted to 
take their place in one great spiritual common- 
wealth cannot be a mere show or appearance for 
an eternally complete Deity ; though religious 
feeling compels us to think that the long disci- 
pline of our mortal life, its joys and sorrows, its 
sins and struggles and infinite aspirations, cannot 
be indifferent to God himself, as if it were merely 
a pageant that passed before him, but must rather 
be conceived as a process in which he bears a 
guiding part, a process whose results are truly an 
enrichment of his own life, — although all this 
may, or shall we say, must be true, yet surely 



36 THEISM 

we cannot so identify God with the process of 
human history as to say that we have in the his- 
tory of philosophy, for example, the successive 
stages by which God arrived at a knowledge of 
himself, complete knowledge being dated from 
the publication of Hegel's works in the beginning 
of the present century. What we really have is 
the history of man's repeated attempts to solve 
the problem of the universe, — a history which, 
even from this point of view, we may not un- 
reasonably expect to show marks of progress and 
increasing insight ; though, as I ventured to say 
on another occasion, even at the end, if we are 
honest with ourselves, the insight is so dim that 
the title of absolute knowledge applied to it has 
the sound of Mephistophelian mockery. 

It is, if possible, even more plainly so in the case 
of religion. What is religion, if not an attitude 
of the subjective spirit of man ? We are here alto- 
gether on human ground. And the same is true of 
art and of history itself, — the history of civiliza- 
tion, of States and empires. Is it not effrontery to 
narrow down the Spirit of the universe to a series 
of events upon this planet ? Can we believe, as. 
Lotze puts it, " that the creative cause of the uni^ 
verse issued from its darkness into the light of 
manifestation only by the narrow path of earthly 



THEISM 37 

nature, and after having formed man and human 
life retreated again into infinity, as if with all its 
ends accomplished ? For this dialectical idyll 
we must substitute an outlook into the bound- 
lessness of other worlds, not with the vain effort 
to know the unknowable, but with the view of 
letting the boundlessness of this background 
mark out the narrow limits of the realm of exist- 
ence actually knowable by us." 1 And when, in 
the realm of action and political history, Hegel 
formulates the characteristic thesis of an absolute 
philosophy, " The real is the rational," or tells us 
that the State is the divine Idea as it exists 
on earth, does not the optimistic verdict sound 
again like hard-hearted mockery, when we turn 
our eyes upon the miserable inadequacies, the 
cruel wrongs, the festering sores of civilization 
even at its best ? Certainly the State may be said 
to be of divine institution, inasmuch as it is a 
schoolmaster to lead us into the ethical life of 
self-surrender, mutual respect, and mutual ser- 
vice, making us feel ourselves members one of 
another, and teaching us, if need be, to lay down 
our lives for our native land. In all these things, 
we do well to regard the fabric of society and the 
State as the instrument of a divine educative pur- 

1 Lotze, Microcosmus, I. 458 (English translation). 



38 THEISM 

pose ; but if we name it " the divine Idea as it 
exists on earth," surely the stress must be laid at 
least equally on the second part of the phrase. 
We must distinguish, as Plato does, between the 
pattern laid up in heaven of a perfect common- 
wealth and any earthly realization of it, marred 
and defaced by human weakness and passions. 

The defect of Hegel's way of stating things is 
thus that he apparently refuses to recognize any 
distinction between the process of human experi- 
ence and what we may call the divine experience 
— the actuality of the divine life. He recognizes 
only one process, and one spirit or subject as 
the bearer of the process, the being that passes 
through the process. At times, this subject is 
spoken of as the world-spirit, which is a meta- 
phorical expression like the Humanity of the 
Comtists,- gathering up into unity innumerable 
finite individualities ; but we are plainly intended 
to identify the world-spirit with the Absolute Be- 
ing himself, the spirit in all spirits, as Hegel some- 
times calls him. Now, obviously, if this identi- 
fication is pressed, it is tantamount to a denial 
of any self-centred divine life, — any actuality of 
God for himself, in the Hegelian phrase. There 
is no knowledge, that is to say, in the universe, 
no understanding of the scheme of things any- 



THEISM 39 

where, more comprehensive than that which 
works itself out in laborious patchwork in 
this and the other human brain. There is 
no goodness, no justice, no tenderness, save 
that which springs in the human heart. This 
is the sense in which Hegel's doctrine was 
developed by many of his ablest followers, 
those who are known as the Hegelians of 
the Left ; and such a doctrine differs in no 
essential particulars from the Eeligion of Human- 
ity, except that it goes metaphysically a step 
farther, and identifies humanity with the abso- 
lute ground of the universe. And, among English 
Hegelians at the present day, it is observable 
that this negative polemic reproduces itself in 
certain writers, yielding a phase of thought which 
may not unfairly be described as Hegelian posi- 
tivism. The doctrine of immortality, or of any 
world beyond the present, and the idea of any 
God beyond what it calls " the civilization of 
Christendom," are especially obnoxious to this 
phase of thought. 

But, to my mind, the deification of humanity 
has only to be stated in order to condemn itself. 
When the matter comes to this issue, we have a 
right to fall back upon the elemental simplicities 
of thought, — such as we find, for example, in the 



40 THEISM 

Book of Job : " Where wast thou when I laid 
the foundations of the earth ? Whereupon are 
the foundations thereof fastened ? or who laid the 
corner-stone thereof, when the morning stars 
sang together and all the sons of God shouted for 
joy ? " And it is not only the immensities of space 
and time and resistless might that raise this per- 
tinent question ; it applies no less to the moral 
qualities in which we recognize the true great- 
ness of our race, — a greatness with which nothing 
physical can be put in comparison. For the 
Positivist is right, when he recognizes in the 
spiritual nobilities of human character the only 
fitting object of adoration or worship ; mere ex- 
tent, mere power, however vast, have nothing 
godlike in themselves. " Should the universe," 
said Pascal in a well-known passage, " conspire 
to crush him, man would still be nobler than 
that by which he falls ; for he knows that he 
dies, and of the victory which the universe has 
over him the universe knows nothing." It is 
the physical universe which both Pascal and the 
Positivists have in view, when they oppose to it 
the conscious life of man ; and the Positivists 
would have us suppose that man, a physical 
creature, outcome of a physical world, developed, 
or rather actually created, out of himself the god- 



THEISM 41 

like qualities of justice and mercy and all the 
varied forms of goodness, crowning himself thus 
the rightful superior of the godless universe from 
which he sprang. 

I cannot for a moment accept the view of evo- 
lution which makes it consist in this cunning 
manufacture of something out of nothing. Man 
certainly does develop these moral qualities, and 
he develops them himself, for only what is self- 
acquired is a moral acquisition at all. But in his 
own strength he can do nothing. It is to misread 
the whole nature of development to suppose that 
man, as an isolated finite creature, could take a 
single step in advance. Such a being, supposing 
it possible for such a being to exist, would re- 
main eternally fixed in a dead sameness of being. 
What it was, it would remain. Development or 
progress is not the making of something out of 
nothing, but the unfolding or manifestation of that 
which in another aspect eternally is. It is possi- 
ble, therefore, only to a being who forms part of a 
divinely guided process, and who draws in conse- 
quence from a fount of eternal fulness. Just as 
it is impossible, therefore, to believe that there is 
no knowledge in the universe greater than that of 
man or of beings like him, so it is incredible that 
there should be no Eternal Goodness, as the source 



42 THEISM 

of those ideals of which we are conscious as the 
guiding star of all our progress, but which we our- 
selves so palpably fail to realize. 

In justice to Hegel, it is only proper to say that 
it is precisely his contribution to a true doctrine 
of evolution which forms one of his most im- 
portant services to philosophy. Hegelianism has 
insisted that a development is not an addition of 
that which was in no sense there before ; con- 
sequently a developing series can only be under- 
stood in the light of its highest term. The true 
nature of the cause becomes apparent only in the 
effect. All explanation of the higher by the 
lower, such as the naturalistic theories attempt, 
is philosophically a hysteron proteron, — a precise 
inversion of the true account. The antecedents 
assigned are not the causes of the consequents ; 
for by antecedents the naturalistic theories mean 
the antecedents (matter and energy for example) 
in abstraction from their consequents, the ante- 
cedents taken as they appear in themselves, or as 
we might suppose them to be if no such conse- 
quents had ever issued from them. So conceived, 
however, the antecedents have no real existence 
— they are mere entia rationis — abstract aspects 
of the one concrete fact which we call the uni- 
verse. The true nature of the antecedents is only 



THEISM 43 

learned by reference to the consequents which 
follow ; or, as I put it before, the true nature of 
the cause becomes apparent only in the effect. 
All ultimate or philosophical explanation must 
look to the end. Hence the futility of all at- 
tempts to explain human life in terms of the 
merely animal, to explain life in terms of the inor- 
ganic, and ultimately to find a sufficient formula 
for the cosmic process in terms of the redistribu- 
tion of matter and motion. 

The stress, therefore, which Hegelianism has 
laid upon the true interpretation of evolution con- 
stitutes, as I have said, one of its great claims upon 
our gratitude in an age when evolution is every- 
where in the air, and when the most misleading 
ideas of its nature are current. The interpreta- 
tion, it is true, is no new insight on Hegel's part ; 
it is substantially what we find in Aristotle. 
But inasmuch as Hegel has incorporated it in 
the very structure of his thinking and given it a 
powerful modern expression, we rightly connect 
the doctrine with his name. It is obvious, how- 
ever, that the line of thought which identifies 
the divine source and goal of evolution with its 
highest human manifestations — which believes 
that the Absolute first arrives at self-conscious- 
ness in man, and has no other self-conscious 



44 THEISM 

existence — falls away from the profound Aristo- 
telian view of the ivepyeia, or completed actual- 
ity, as the eternal prius of all its evolutionary 
phases, and falls back upon the naturalistic view 
according to which the new stage adds to its 
predecessor something which was not there be- 
fore at all. The appearance of man becomes 
then identical with the creation of God; man 
creates himself, and at the same time brings God 
to the birth. On such an interpretation, Hegel- 
ianism plainly declines upon the level of the 
purely materialistic theories ; and however we 
may judge of Hegel's own meaning and inten- 
tion, history shows that this danger is inherent 
in his method of statement and in the excessive 
emphasis laid on the doctrine of immanence. 1 

The real explanation of Hegel's sheer identi- 
fication of the divine existence with the human 
process is doubtless to be found in the too exclu- 
sive intellectualism of his system. Knowledge 
as such does not force into view the differences 
between one personality and another. Eather, 
so far as we merely know, we sink those cliffer- 

1 It may be added in passing that, even if such a view of 
evolution were competent to explain the actual stage reached 
by man in knowledge and morality, it would be quite unable 
to explain the possibility of progress and the existence of the 
ideal which guides that progress. 



THEISM 45 

ences, and occupy what is called an objective or 
impersonal standpoint. If we regard the world 
simply as a system of thought, as something to 
be intellectually understood and reproduced, we 
all place ourselves at the same point of view. 
We are re-thinking the same thoughts; and it 
becomes not unnatural to treat the different 
finite thinkers as reproductions, functions, or 
modes of one universal self-consciousness. This 
unification of consciousness in a single Self is 
sometimes carried so far that to speak of self- 
consciousness or mind in the plural is branded as 
an apostasy from the only true philosophic faith. 

But any plausibility which this point of view 
may possess within the realm of pure intellect 
vanishes at once as soon as we turn to the moral 
sphere ; we are not merely contemplative intel- 
lects, we are, above all, agents or doers. It is 
well, as Hegel does, to insist on the rational 
character of the universe, but to make Thought 
the exclusive principle is either to fall into a 
one-sided extreme or to use " thought " in a non- 
natural sense. Thought cannot fairly be made 
to include will, and any theory of the universe 
which neglects the fact of will omits that which 
seems to communicate a living reality to the 
whole. A system which, like Hegel's, lays ex- 



46 THEISM 

elusive stress on thought is always in danger 
of reducing the universe to a phantasm of the 
intellect, — an impersonal system of thought- 
harmony, — or, in Mr. Bradley's vivid phrase, 
"an unearthly ballet of bloodless categories." 
It is in the will, in purposive action, and par- 
ticularly in our moral activity, as Fichte, to my 
mind, conclusively demonstrated, that we lay 
hold upon reality. All that we know might be 
but a dream-procession of shadows, and the mind 
of the dreamer no more than the still mirror in 
which they are reflected, if indeed it were any- 
thing but the shifting shadows themselves. But 
in the purposive " I will," each man is real, and 
is immediately conscious of his own reality. 
Whatever else may or may not be real, this is 
real. This is the fundamental belief, around 
which scepticism may weave its maze of doubts 
and logical puzzles, but from which it is eventu- 
ally powerless to dislodge us, because no argument 
can affect an immediate certainty, — a certainty, 
moreover, on which our whole view of the uni- 
verse depends. 

Now the individuality or self-hood of which we 
are conscious in willing, is felt as one which im- 
plies a real difference not only between me and any 
other finite self, but also a real difference or dual- 



THEISM 47 

ism between me and the absolute spirit. I exist 
in God. " The human soul," as has been said, " is 
neither self- derived nor self-existing. It would 
vanish if it had not a substance, and its substance 
is God." 1 God is the fountain light of all our 
day, the master light of all our seeing, inasmuch 
as we share in the common or universal reason; 
and his are the ideals which illuminate and guide 
our life. But in our wills we feel a principle of 
self-hood, which separates us even from the 
Being who is the ground of our existence. This 
is most manifest in the sphere of moral duty. 
" Our wills are ours to make them Thine," as the 
poet finely puts it. But they must be really 
ours, if there is to be any ethical value in the 
surrender, — if there is even to be any meaning 
in the process at all. If there are not two wills 
involved, then no relation between them is pos- 
sible, and the imaginary duality is an illusion 
incident to our limited point of view. But the 
ethical consciousness places its veto once for all 
upon any such sophistication of its primary and 
absolute deliverance; and by that absolute de- 
liverance, we shall do well, I think, to stand. 
The speculative reason sees no alternative be- 
tween absolute dependence, which would make 

1 Lord Gifford, quoted by Professor Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 
p. 284. 



48 THEISM 

us merely the pipes upon which the divine mu- 
sician plays, and absolute independence, which 
would make the world consist of a plurality of 
self-subsistent real beings. These are the only 
kinds of relation which it finds intelligible. But 
it seems to me that it must be, in the nature 
of the case, impossible for the finite spirit to 
understand the mode of its relation to the in- 
finite or absolute Spirit in which it lives. That 
relation could only be intelligible from the ab- 
solute point of view. The fact, then, that we 
cannot reconcile the partial independence and 
freedom of the finite self with its acknowledged 
dependence upon God in other respects, need not 
force us to abandon our primary moral convic- 
tion, in deference to a speculative theory which 
may be applying a finite plumb-line to measure 
the resources of the infinite. After all, why 
should the creation of beings with a real, though 
partial, freedom and independence be an absolute 
impossibility ? It is certainly the only view 
which makes the world a real place, — which 
makes the whole labor of history more than 
a shadow fight or aimless phantasmagoria. 

I have dwelt, in the foregoing, upon the inade- 
quacy of any theory which pushes the doctrine 



THEISM x 49 

of immanence to the extreme of absolutely identi- 
fying the finite and the human process. Let me 
exemplify, by a recent instance, a counter error 
into which it is easy to fall. The first danger we 
found historically exemplified in the Hegelian 
system, or at least in important developments of 
Hegelian thought. Mr. Bradley's recent work 
on " Appearance and Reality " may be regarded, 
in many respects, as an attempt to supplement 
and correct the defects of the Hegelian state- 
ment; and as it is without doubt the most im- 
portant metaphysical work which has appeared 
in England for a considerable time, I make no 
apology for using it in illustration of the next 
part of my argument. 

Mr. Bradley has always protested against the 
reduction of the life of the world to a set of 
logical categories ; and in this volume he recalls 
his fellow Hegelians from a too narrow human- 
ism to an insight into the vastness of the sus- 
taining Life that operates unspent throughout 
the universe. The whole book is a praiseworthy 
attempt to treat the life of the Absolute for 
itself as a reality, as the most real of realities. 
The truth on which he insists may seem toler- 
ably elementary ; the strange thing would rather 
seem to be that man should ever forget his 

4 



50 THEISM 

position as a finite incident in the plan of things, 
and measure himself with the unmeasurable 
Spirit of the universe. Is it not both absurd 
and blasphemous to suppose that the Power 
which cradles and encompasses all our lives 
is not itself a living fact, and that it is re- 
served for man to bring the Absolute, as it were, 
to the birth ? True as it is, in the proper refer- 
ence, to say that the Absolute realizes itself in 
human self-consciousness, the statement becomes 
fundamentally absurd, if it is taken to mean that 
the Absolute exists, so to speak, by the grace of 
man, and lives only in the breath of his nostrils. 
But the most elementary truths are sometimes 
most easily forgotten in the heat of polemic 
against some particular error. And therefore 
the stress which Mr. Bradley lays throughout his 
volume upon the necessarily superhuman charac- 
ter of the Absolute — its inexpressible and 
incomprehensible transcendence of human con- 
ditions of being and thinking — constitutes a 
salutary corrective to a good deal of current 
speculation. But Mr. Bradley has not been con- 
tent simply to restore to us this fundamental in- 
sight. He offers us himself a constructive theory 
of absolute experience — in vague outline, as he 
often admits, but still a constructive theory in 



THEISM 51 

pretty definite terms. And the reason why I call 
attention to this theory is that it illustrates so 
effectively the counter-error against which we 
must guard in forming our conception of the 
divine nature, — the pantheism or akosmism 
which reduces all finite experience to a species 
of illusion. 

This goal is indicated already in the title of 
the hook "Appearance and Eeality " ; for " reality " 
is restricted to the life of the Absolute for itself, 
and all the world of our knowledge and experience 
is described as " appearance," — branded, indeed, as 
" mere appearance," " irrational," " self-contradic- 
tory " appearance, not to mention other deprecia- 
tory adjectives and terms of excommunication. 
According to Mr. Bradley, knowledge, inasmuch 
as it is relational throughout, is defective as such ; 
it makes distinctions (it distinguishes qualities, 
for example, in a thing) but it never re- 
duces its distinctions to a real unity. The very 
relation of subject and object, which ' must 
exist in every instance of knowledge, implies 
a difference not overcome. But in the Absolute 
all differences must be overcome, perfect unity 
must be realized ; there must be what is called 
an "all-pervasive transfusion." Now, the only 
hint we have of such a state, according to Mr. 



52 THEISM 

Bradley, is in pure feeling — the diffused sense 
of being, out of which our conscious life seems 
continually to emerge. The first dawn of active 
consciousness introduces the distinctions of know- 
ledge into this characterless unity. Indeed, 
Mr. Bradley admits that we hardly possess this 
state of mere feeling " as more than that which 
we are in the act of losing." I would go farther 
and say more definitely that it is a state which 
we never actually realize, though we seem at 
times to approximate to it, and conceive it as 
being approached asymptotically in the lowest 
forms of organic life. Such asymptotic approach 
consists simply in dropping one by one the dis- 
tinctions of our own conscious existence. Con- 
sequently, the state is describable only by nega- 
tives, and its realization would mean a lapse into 
unconsciousness altogether. 

Be that as it may, in the meantime, this is 
the analogy which Mr. Bradley uses throughout, 
in his attempt to construct or body forth the 
experience of the Absolute. It must be a higher 
experience in which thought shall, as it were, 
return to the immediacy of feeling. "We can 
form the general idea," he says, "of an abso- 
lute intuition in which "phenomenal distinctions 
are merged, a whole become immediate at a 



THEISM 53 

higher stage without losing any richness . . . 
a total experience where will and thought and 
feeling may all once more be one." But though 
Mr. Bradley is constantly saying that no rich- 
ness is lost, that all the distinctions are some- 
how retained and preserved, it is nothing more 
than saying. His own logic, which stumbles 
persistently over the fact of difference and re- 
lation, and his own analogy of the distinction- 
less life of feeling, carry him irresistibly to a 
Brahmanic pantheism, in which all finite ex- 
istence simply disappears as an unreal dream. 
He runs riot in metaphors to describe the consum- 
mation of finite appearance in the Absolute ; and 
the nature of these metaphors is of itself suffi- 
ciently instructive. Appearances are said to be 
"merged," "fused," " blended," " absorbed," " run 
together," " embraced and harmonized," " dis- 
solved in a higher unity," " transformed," above 
all, "transmuted." "Transmuted" is the blessed 
word from which Mr. Bradley seems to derive 
most comfort. But for " transmuted " we find at 
times the sinister synonyms " suppressed," " dis- 
solved," " lost." In one place " transmuted " and 
"destroyed" are expressly coupled, while in another 
we are told that the " process of correction," which 
finite existence undergoes in the Absolute mav 



54 THEISM 

" entirely dissipate its nature." In this fashion, 
the finite self-consciousness, among other things, 
is to be embraced and harmonized by being 
"transmuted and suppressed as such." Or, as 
he puts it elsewhere with audacious irony, "the 
individual never can in himself become a harmon- 
ious system. In the complete gift and dissipation 
of his personality, he, as such, must vanish." A 
gift of personality which is at the same time the 
dissipation of the personality in question, a har- 
monizing which means disappearance, recall too 
forcibly the Koman method of pacification, — they 
make a desert and they call it peace. 

In fact there can be no doubt that Mr. 
Bradley's speculation, with its repudiation of 
the form of knowledge as such, on the ground 
of the difference and relation which it involves, 
leads, not to any higher or larger unity, but to 
the pit of undifferentiated substance, out of 
which Hegel took so much pains to dig phi- 
losophy. The greater part of Mr. Bradley's book 
seems to me to reproduce in essence, and often 
almost in expression, the Spinozistic doctrine of 
Imagination, which makes finite existence a 
species of illusion. No doubt there were two 
tendencies at strife in Spinoza, too; but his 
dominant thought is that " all determination is 



THEISM 55 

negation," and so is not truly real. Hence all 
determinations vanish, like clouds before the sun, 
in the viewless unity of the unica substantia. 
But if finite existence is illusory, and its distinc- 
tions simply disappear, then of necessity the 
unity which we reach by the denial of these 
distinctions is quite characterless. We have 
illusion on the one side, and, as the counter 
stroke, nonentity on the other. For does not 
Scotus Erigena tell us, at the end of a similar 
line of thought, " Deus propter excellentiam non 
immerito nihil vocatur " ? 

The mention of Erigena suggests the extent 
to which this mode of reasoning has prevailed. 
Although it is chiefly associated in modern phi- 
losophy with Spinozism and the doctrine of 
undifferentiated substance, as the most typical 
example of the tendency, it dominates not only 
the Brahmanic speculation of the East, but, from 
Philo downwards, has formed a constant element 
in the religious philosophy of the West. Neo- 
Platonism culminates in the doctrine of the abso- 
lutely transcendent One, " beyond " both the 
sensuous and the intellectual world, elevated 
above all thought, all being, all goodness, neither 
conscious, therefore, nor active ; nameless, and 
without any quality whatsoever. So Plotinus 



56 THEISM 

reasoned, while his followers endeavored to scale 
a still giddier height in refusing even to desig- 
nate the ineffable as " One." Iamblichus and 
Proclus superimposed upon the One of Plotinus 
a still higher, completely ineffable, principle. 
The Neo-Platonic philosophy had a powerful 
influence upon Christian thought. It was re- 
vived in the great system of Erigena at the 
beginning of the ninth century, and it is the 
underlying thought of all speculative mysticism. 
Under the name of " negative theology," it has 
continually reappeared in the higher walks of 
theological philosophy ; perhaps its most recent 
and noteworthy reappearance being made in 
Dean Mansel's celebrated Bampton Lectures, 
which employ the weapons of agnosticism in 
defence of the churchly faith. I may be able, 
perhaps, before I close, to indicate what seems to 
me the truth which this negative theology 
inaptly expresses. But taken as it stands, and 
as it states itself, it produces the effect of a 
dangerous falsehood. Striving to exalt the 
Divine into a region beyond thought and beyond 
expression, it leaves us with nothing in our 
grasp at all. The Absolute Being becomes a 
mere abstraction or, like Shelley's Demogorgon, 
"a mighty Darkness filling the seat of power." 



THEISM 57 

This is well exemplified in the conclusions to 
which Mr. Bradley is driven. Morality, he 
says, cannot, as such, be ascribed to the 
Absolute. Goodness, as such, is but appearance, 
and is transcended in the Absolute. Will can- 
not belong, as such, to the Absolute. In the 
Absolute even thought must " lose and transcend 
its proper self." If the term "personal," he says 
again, is to bear anything like its ordinary sense, 
then assuredly the Absolute is not merely per- 
sonal. "The Absolute," he says roundly, "is 
not personal, nor is it moral, nor is it beautiful 
or true." 

What is the inevitable effect upon the mind 
of this cluster of negations ? Surely it will be 
this : Either the Absolute will be regarded as a 
mere Unknowable, with which we have no con- 
cern; or the denial of will, intellect, morality, 
personality, beauty, and truth, will be taken to 
mean that the Absolute is a unity indifferent to 
these higher aspects of experience. It will be 
regarded as non-moral and impersonal, in the 
sense of being below these distinctions; and our 
Absolute will then remarkably resemble the soul- 
less matter of the materialist. Nothing, indeed, 
is more certain than that extremes meet in this 
fashion, and that the attempt to reach the super- 



58 THEISM 

human falls back into the infra-human. Of 
course Mr. Bradley intended his unity to be a 
higher and not a lower unity. " The Absolute," 
he says in one place, " is not personal, because it 
is personal and more. It is, in a word, super- 
personal." And as if aware of the danger that 
lurks in his denials, he even warns us that, if 
there is a risk of falling back upon the lower 
unity, it is better to affirm personality than to 
call the Absolute impersonal. But there is more 
than a risk ; I maintain there is an absolute cer- 
tainty that this will be the end. 

Hence the somewhat unexpected result of Mr. 
Bradley's attempt to transcend experience and to 
determine the Absolute as such — its nature and 
mode of existence for itself — is to throw into 
relief the strong points of the Hegelian scheme. 
The negative results of Mr. Bradley's search are 
an involuntary confirmation of Hegel's wisdom 
in refusing to step beyond the circle of know- 
ledge and the process of history. We have seen 
that Hegel's theory is indefensible, so far as it 
equates the Absolute with human experience. 
But the theory is false only so far as it proposes 
to confine the spirit of the Universe to these 
earthly tabernacles. So understood, I have urged 
that it cabins the spirit of man within a narrow 



THEISM 59 

and self-sufficient positivism. It undermines the 
sentiment of reverence, and dulls our sense of 
the infinite greatness and the infinite mystery of 
the world. But it is profoundly true, so far as it 
asserts that only by predicates drawn from hu- 
man experience can we determine the Absolute 
at all, and that, moreover, such determination is 
substantially and practically, though doubtless 
not literally, true. 

For here is the core of truth that gives vital- 
ity to "negative theology," and ensures its con- 
stant re-appearance. The nature of the existence 
which the Absolute enjoys for itself is, and must 
be, incomprehensible save by the Absolute itself. 
We cannot construct the Divine life even in vague 
generality, and that for the simplest of all rea- 
sons, — we are men, and not God. Mr. Bradley's 
discussion seems to me to prove afresh that the at- 
tempt metaphysically, scientifically, or literally, 1 
to determine the Absolute as such is necessarily 
barren. Where the definition is not a mere tau- 
tology, it is a complex of negatives, and if not 
technically untrue, it has in its suggestions the 
effects of an untruth. Our statements about the 
Absolute are actually nearer the truth where 
they give up the pretence of literal exactitude, 

1 I use these here for the moment as equivalent terms. 



60 THEISM 

and speak in terms of morality and religion, ap- 
plying to it the characteristics of our highest 
experience. Such language recognizes itself in 
general (or at least it certainly should recognize 
itself) as possessing only symbolical truth, — as 
being in fact " thrown out," as Matthew Arnold 
used to say, at a vast reality. But both religion 
and the higher poetry — just because they give 
up the pretence of an impossible exactitude — 
carry us, I cannot doubt, nearer to the meaning 
of the world than the formulae of an abstract 
metaphysics. 

Such a conclusion may be decried in turn as 
agnostic, but names need frighten no one. The 
agnosticism which rests on the idea of an un- 
knowable thing-in-itself — the agnosticism which 
many of Kant's and Spencer's arguments would 
establish — is certainly baseless. But there are 
regions of speculation where agnosticism is the 
only healthy attitude. Such a region I hold to 
be that of the Absolute as such. But because 
the Absolute in this sense cannot be compassed 
by the finite mind, it by no means follows that 
such an all-embracing experience is not a reality ; 
on the contrary, the denial of such a possibility 
would seem to be more than presumptuous. And, 
again, the ineffable transcendence of the Absolute 



THEISM 61 

must not be construed to mean that our experi- 
ence is a vain show, which throws no light on the 
real nature of things. Kightly agnostic though 
we are regarding the nature of the Absolute as 
such, no shadow of doubt need fall on the truth of 
our experience as a true revelation of the Absolute 
for us. Hegel was right in seeking the Absolute 
within experience, and finding it too; for cer- 
tainly we can neither seek it nor find it any- 
where else. The truth about the Absolute which 
we extract from our experience is hardly likely 
to be the final truth ; it may be taken up and 
superseded in a wider or fuller truth. And in 
this way we might pass, in successive cycles of 
finite existence, from sphere to sphere of experi- 
ence, from orb to orb of truth ; and even the 
highest would still remain a finite truth, and fall 
infinitely short of the truth of God. But such a 
doctrine of relativity in no way invalidates the 
truth of the revelation at any given stage. The 
fact that the truth I reach is the truth for me, 
does not make it, on that account, less true. It 
is true so far as it goes, and if my experience 
can carry me no further, I am justified in treat- 
ing it as ultimate until it is superseded. Should 
it ever be superseded, I shall then see both how 
it is modified by being comprehended in a higher 



62 THEISM 

truth, and also how it and no other statement 
of the truth could have been true at my former 
standpoint. But before that higher standpoint 
is reached, to seek to discredit our present in- 
sight by the general reflection that its truth is 
partial and requires correction, is a perfectly 
empty truth, which, in its bearing upon human 
life, must almost certainly have the effect of an 
untruth. 

We do well, therefore, to take human experi- 
ence, not indeed as itself the Absolute bodily, but 
as constituting the only accessible and authentic 
revelation of its nature to us. And, in the inter- 
pretation of experience, our most essential help is 
to be found in a true theory of evolution ; for the 
divine must be held to be most fully and ade- 
quately revealed in the highest aspects of our 
experience. If, again, we are asked how we dis- 
tinguish between what is higher and lower, it is 
clear that no formal or merely intellectual test, 
such as " growing complexity of detail harmon- 
ized within a single whole," will suffice. This 
may be a characteristic of the higher stages, but 
clearly the realization of an abstract formula like 
this possesses in itself no interest or value. It 
is the content of any experience which makes it 
higher in any vital sense, and makes it of decisive 



THEISM bd 

importance as throwing light on the meaning of 
experience as a whole. And in any such esti- 
mate we must ultimately rest our whole case on 
an absolute judgment of value. Man, says Kant, 
is, in his typically rational activities, an End-in- 
himself. The life, that is to say, which is guided 
by the ideals of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, 
and which partially realizes these, possesses an 
absolute and indefeasible worth. Such a judg- 
ment represents a conviction so deep that we are 
prepared to stake everything upon it. Strictly 
speaking, such a conviction is not the result of 
argument, or a deduction from any philosophic 
system. It might rather be spoken of as an 
assumption, the fundamental assumption upon 
which all subsequent philosophizing must de- 
pend. Without this assumption of the infinite 
value and significance of human life, argument 
about God is simply waste of time. The man 
who does not start from this assumption — the 
man who can embrace the opposite alternative 
— is not accessible to any argument. For him 
the world has no serious meaning, and he him- 
self has no serious function to discharge in it. 
He has denied his calling, or, as Fichte puts it, 
he has elected to be a thing and not a person. Of 
such an one it can only be said, He is joined to 



64 THEISM 

his idols, let him alone. Faith in God can only 
rest securely on the basal certainty of duty, and 
the view of human destiny and the universal 
purpose that springs therefrom. This faith in 
the divine significance of life has never perhaps 
been more nobly expressed than it is by Words- 
worth in the sonnet with which he closes his 
sonnet-series on the Eiver Duddon, and I do not 
think that these lectures could be concluded in 
any more fitting words: — 

" I thought of Thee, my partner and my guide, 
As being past away. — Vain sympathies ! 
For backward, Duddon ! as I cast my eyes, 
I see what was, and is, and will abide ; 
Still glides the Stream, and shall forever glide ; 
The Form remains, the Function never dies ; 
While we, the brave, the mighty and the wise, 
We Men, who in our morn of youth defied 
The elements, must vanish ; — be it so ! 
Enough, if something from our hands has power 
To live, and act, and serve the future hour ; 
And if, as toward the silent tomb we go, 
Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent 

dower, 
We feel that we are greater than we know." 



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